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The following is from our visiting priest, Fr. Martin Henry:

Dear Friends,

It’s slightly ironic that the Son of God, the light of the world, whose birth we anticipate in Advent, should have been born not during the hours of daylight, but in the middle of the night. From earliest times, Christian thinkers saw a deep symbolical meaning in the circumstances of Christ’s birth.
In calling Christ, who was born during the hours of darkness, the light of the world, the early Christians knew that with the birth of Christ a light had come into their world that was of a different order from the natural light of the sun.
The source of the light Christ brought, the source of the light he incarnated, was not natural, but supernatural. It was a light that came directly from God. It was not the created light of the sun, but the saving light of God; not, fundamentally, the light of creation, but the light of redemption.
But the early Christians knew that night or darkness is also a symbol of the frequent darkness of human history. And in seeing Christ’s light as illuminating the darkness, they believed that the light of Christ was a force that none of the darkness of this world could ever overcome, as St John was to put it in the opening chapter of his gospel. It was this faith that they passed on to subsequent generations of Christians: the realization that, no matter how terrible or awful human history may be or become, it can never overpower or extinguish the light of Christ.
This simple, but profound Christian faith that came into the world roughly two thousand years ago, has admittedly not driven away all the shadows of our world, but it has continued to shine throughout the past two millennia. And it can continue to illuminate our path through the ‘night of this world’, as St Augustine once put it, and lead us all into the full daylight of God’s kingdom in heaven.
The good news of Christmas is that the Son of God who became incarnate for us on that first Christmas night almost two thousand years ago is also God’s promise that humanity’s long journey through the night of history will not have been in vain.
I wish you a blessed Advent and a peaceful Christmas.